Problem: the remotehost machine is a very light Alpine Linux container. Very light. So light that it doesn’t have any interpreter : no perl, no php, no ruby… not even python !

So to manage your clients, you have to be prepared to have a big chunk of some interpreter, being ruby (for puppet, for example), or python.

I am not a huge fan of interpreted languages. But if I have to install one, I guess python is not the worst choice. Moreover, it is installed by default on CentOS, Debian, etc. And also, did I mention that Ansible is agentless? ;—)